To My Younger Brethren Part 2

TO KNOW CHRIST IS INDISPENSABLE.

So let us listen, making a pause to do so. Perhaps just now the knock may be audible, and certain articulate sounds may come from outside, saying that a PERSON waits for readmission to HIS place in our busy, multifarious life, and that HE can be content with nothing short of heart-intimacy with us, and that we, if we would not forsake our own mercy, must be content with nothing short of heart-intimacy with HIM.

"I counsel thee to _buy_ of Me." Let us do it; let us pay over, at His feet, our poor fancied wealth of self's energies and undertakings (as regards our own good opinion of them), receiving from Him the heavenly "gold" of His own glorious grace and peace, and the "white robe" of a living and loving conformity to His likeness, and the "eye-salve" of His illumination, in which we see things as He sees them. It is better, as von Machtholf says it is, to have Him within the heart's chamber, at once as Guest and as Host, in that blessed inter-communion, than to be apparently the most successful of organizers or of toilers, strong in ourselves, but without the secret of the Presence of the Lord.

It is scarcely needful, I trust, to explain what I do _not_ mean. My very last intention is to speak slightingly of devoted work and self-sacrificing endeavours, whether or no they take the line which most approves itself to me. A _faineant_ in the English Ministry to-day is something worse than even a c.u.mberer of the ground; he is, I dare to say, like a upas upon it, blighting where he throws his shadow, so conspicuous and so deadly must be the example of such a life in the Minister of such a Gospel. But what I mean, again and again, is this, that the days demand, along with a thoroughgoing while prudent practicality, more and more also of a profound reality of spiritual knowledge of the Lord in those who labour in His Name. With the growing stress of our time we _must_ have not less but more of this, in those who are called to meet that stress. This is vital, if we would not be stifled and succ.u.mb as Christians altogether.

So this is my plea, dear Brother in the Ministry, now making your first essays in some great city parish, or wherever it may be: cultivate, as for your life, secret intercourse with G.o.d.

BIBLE STUDY.

And with this view, I now say specially, cultivate such intercourse _laying His holy Word open before you_. I spoke in the previous Chapter of the Bible spread open by the evening lamp, the Bible marked with signs of diligent search. With all my heart I mean to press that thought. It will be best to reserve for another Chapter certain suggestions on methods of Bible study. But I may, and I will at once, offer a few words on the subject in general. It is a subject which lies near my heart, and of the urgent importance of which I am very sure.

THE ORDINATION CHARGE.

Above all then I would entreat you to be a Bible student _at whatever cost of other religious reading_. It is a very common thing to subst.i.tute, practically, for the Bible a little library of _livres de piete_, as the French would call them, small "good books." Not very long ago, in the course of an ordination examination, I came across an instructive instance. In answer to a question in a "Pastoral Paper" for candidates for Priest's Orders, a thoughtful young Clergyman stated incidentally that he used every day with great profit certain devotional books, and that about twice a week he took for definite meditation and prayer a pa.s.sage from the Gospels. It struck me that here was a strange and sad inversion of the right order of proportion; devotional books daily, and the New Testament (in any sense of earnest meditative study) about twice a week! Very different, I thought, is the view and teaching of the Church of England in this matter of the spiritual reading of her Ministers. What does the Church say, through the Bishop, when the Deacon is ordained Presbyter? "Seeing that you cannot by any other means compa.s.s the doing of so weighty a work, pertaining to the salvation of man, but with doctrine and exhortation taken out of the Holy Scriptures, and with a life agreeable to the same; consider how studious ye ought to be in reading and learning the Scriptures.... We have good hope that you will continually pray to G.o.d the Father, by the mediation of our only Saviour Jesus Christ, for the heavenly a.s.sistance of the Holy Ghost; that, by daily reading and weighing of the Scriptures, ye may wax riper and stronger in your Ministry."

And I need not go about to prove that the Church does not mean such daily "reading and weighing" to wait till the young man is actually ordained Priest. We should scarcely have had the First Homily of the First Book written, if such had been her mind. Have you ever read over that "Voice of the Church"?

M. HENRI La.s.sERRE ON DEVOTIONAL READING.

A remarkable confirmation of my present contention comes to us from an unexpected quarter. I refer to the Preface prefixed by that ardent Roman Catholic, M. Henri La.s.serre, to his remarkable French translation of the Four Gospels, the book which, December 4, 1886, received the cordial benediction of Leo XIII., but within a twelvemonth, such is "the power behind the Pope," was placed on the _Index Expurgatorius_. Probably such pa.s.sages as the following had much to do with this strange and sudden self-reversal of the judgment of the Vatican.

"A timid school," after the crisis of the Reformation, which finds, of course, little favour with M. La.s.serre, and on which, very unjustly, he lays much of the blame of the practical prohibition of the Bible within "the Catholic Church," "a timid school tended thenceforth to strike from the hands of believers the divine Book which makes the foundation of our faith, and laboured to subst.i.tute for it by degrees a pious literature, intended to furnish hearts and minds with a nourishment suited to their weakness, a diet without danger. Some of these books, we own without hesitation, are excellent in themselves, and have contributed to the sanctification of many souls. However, this is the exception. In the majority of these works, where, alas, the sugar of devotion takes the place of the salt of wisdom, the eternal truths and the genuine teachings of the Gospel were soon diluted, and, as it were, lost in strange waters.... One and all, the better specimens and the deplorable (_les lamentables_) alike, they are another thing altogether, yes, absolutely another thing, than the Gospel, whose apostolic mission they have noiselessly usurped by an invasion insensible, I had almost called it clandestine.... The general ignorance of the Gospels has been the one cause in France, these twenty years, of the success of the scandalous romance which appeared under the t.i.tle of _La Vie de Jesus_.

Among a people moderately familiar with the narratives of St Matthew, St Mark, St Luke, and St John ... there would have been no need to refute it. Every one would have seen, without a.s.sistance, its flagrant falsifications, its gross sophisms, its absolute emptiness. This deep-seated and complex evil, this enervation of the Christian spirit, this _anaemia_ (_cette anemie_) of so many among us, are an object of sorrowful anxiety (_preoccupation_) for the Catholic thinker" (pp. x, xxv).

CURRENT NEGLECT OF SCRIPTURE.

For the Protestant thinker too, within a Church which has now for centuries, in every possible official way, pressed home the reading of the Bible upon her every member, and of course upon her every Minister, there is material for similar anxieties, _mutatis mutandis_. Bible study, such as our Lord and the Apostles enjoined and encouraged, is not on the increase amongst us, to say the least of it; certainly the ignorance of the blessed Book even among candidates for holy Orders is sometimes, is not seldom, very great indeed. Nay more, there is sometimes, however rarely as yet, an ominous disposition even in clerical circles to shelve the Bible. Quite lately I heard, on excellent authority, that a certain large Clerical Society, revising its rules, deliberately decided that the meetings shall _not_ in future be begun with the reading of Scripture. My friend and Brother, do not swim even on the edges of such a current. Swim with all your might, in your Master's might, against it.

READ IT FOR YOUR OWN NEEDS.

Then lastly I put in my plea, as I sought to do when we were considering the matter of secret prayer, for such a secret study of the Word of G.o.d as shall be _unprofessional, unclerical, and simply Christian_. Resolve to "read, mark, and inwardly digest" so that not now the flock but the shepherd, that is to say you, "may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life." It will be all the better for the flock. Forget sometimes, in the name of Jesus Christ, the pulpit, the mission-room, the Bible-cla.s.s; open the Bible as simply as if you were on Crusoe's island, and were destined to live and die there, alone with G.o.d. You will be all the fresher, all the more sympathetic and to the point, when you do come to speak to the listening people about the Book.

The discoveries which we make in it for our own souls are just the things which we cannot help reporting so as to interest and attract our brethren; as least, that is the sure tendency of things.

BRIDGES AND WITSIUS ON BIBLE STUDY.

Let me write out a slightly abbreviated extract from a golden book, unhappily no longer in print, _The Christian Ministry_, by that diligent student, loving and laborious Pastor, and heavenly-minded man, the remembrance of whom s.h.i.+nes on me like a ray reflected from the Chief Shepherd's face, the late Rev. Charles Bridges.[2]

[2] He died at Hinton Martell, in Dorset, 1869.

"The maxim, _Bonus textuarius est bonus theologus_, marks a grand ministerial qualification--'mighty in the Scriptures.' The importance of this is beautifully expressed by Witsius: 'Let the theologian ascend from the lower school of natural study to the higher department of Scripture, and sitting at the feet of G.o.d as his teacher, learn from His mouth the hidden mysteries of salvation, _which eye hath not seen nor ear heard, which none of the princes of this world knew_; which the most accurate reason cannot search out; which the heavenly chorus of angels, though always beholding the face of G.o.d, _desire to look into_. In the hidden book of Scripture, and nowhere else, are opened the secrets of the most sacred wisdom. Let the theologian delight in these sacred Oracles; let him exercise himself in them day and night; let him meditate in them; let him live in them; let him draw all his wisdom from them; let him compare all his thoughts with them; let him embrace nothing in religion which he does not find there. The attentive study of the Scriptures has a sort of constraining power. It fills the mind with the most splendid form of heavenly truth. It soothes the mind with an inexpressible sweetness; it satisfies the sacred hunger and thirst for knowledge; ... it imprints its own testimony so firmly on the mind, that the believing soul rests on it with the same security as if it had been carried up into the third heaven and heard it from G.o.d's own mouth; it touches all the affections, and breathes the sweetest fragrance of holiness upon the pious reader, even though he may not perhaps comprehend the full extent of his reading.... We ought to draw our views of divine truths immediately from the Scriptures themselves, and to make no other use of human writings than as indices marking those chief points of theology from which we may be instructed in the mind of the Lord'" (pp. 79, 80, ed. 1830).

RIDLEY IN THE ORCHARD.

"In thy Orchard, Pembroke Hall," wrote Nicholas Ridley within a few days of his fiery martyrdom, "(the wals, buts, and trees, if they could speake, would beare me witnes), I learned without booke almost all Paules epistles, yea, and I weene all the Canonicall epistles, save only the Apocalyps. Of which study, although in time a great part did depart from me, yet the sweete smell thereof I trust I shall cary with me into heaven; for the profite thereof I thinke I have felt in all my lyfe tyme ever after."

And so shall it be with us also, if we go and do likewise in our "lyfe tyme," our period, not at present of martyrdom but, G.o.d knoweth it, of need.

CHAPTER III.

_SECRET STUDY OF THE HOLY SCRIPTURES._

_Like those Emmaus travellers we go Forth from the city-gate of things below; Christ at our side, His Scripture for our light, Here burning hearts and there the beatific sight._

Already I have broken ground to some extent in the all-important subject of private Bible Study. Let me now put before my reader and Brother a few more detailed remarks and suggestions on that subject. Such is the holy Book, and such is the variety of possible modes of study, that all I can dream of doing is to touch some parts and sides of the matter which present themselves with special impressiveness to my own mind, or which experience of the needs of friends has suggested to me somewhat particularly.

HIGHER CRITICISM.

To discuss the sacred problems of Scripture Inspiration is not my purpose here. Elsewhere[3] I have attempted to deal with some of them.

All I would do here is, in view of what is truly a "present necessity,"

to ask my Brethren, very deliberately, not to be in haste to take up with the last and boldest word of what is called the Higher Criticism (I speak particularly now of its application to the Old Testament), as if its "advances" were always towards light and fact. I have no complaint against the term Higher Criticism, which has a recognized place in literary technical language, denoting that familiar and lawful process, the study of books not for their grammar and style only, but in order to infer from their whole phenomena what their age is, and their structure, and their character. The Higher Criticism is a term pointing not to methods and results transcending ordinary intelligence, but to a study which aims "higher" than grammatical and textual questions considered as final. And thus of course the most earnest defender of the supernatural character of the Scriptures may be, and very often is, as diligent a "higher critic" as the extremest anti-supernaturalist.

[3] _Veni Creator_, ch. iii

A PLEA FOR CAUTION.

It is not its definition in the abstract but its actual work and spirit, as seen in many leading instances, which constrain me to enter an earnest protest against a too easy confidence in this criticism of, particularly, the Old Testament Scriptures. It is "a thing to give us pause" when we are asked to accept it as proved, or at least as extremely probable, that righteous Abel is a myth; that there was little, if any, monotheism before Abraham; no theophany at Sinai; no Wilderness-Tabernacle; no record of the conquest of Canaan written till long generations after the event; not much written record at all till Samuel; few, if any, Psalms before the age of the Captivity, if not before the age of the Maccabees; certainly two if not more Isaiahs, and probably hardly one Daniel; at least, that the book bearing his name dates from the second century before Christ, and is in fact a Palestinian story-book which has not, perhaps, even a nucleus of history within it. It ought to make us stop and think when we are told that Isaiah did not predict coming events; indeed (for the drift of this teaching goes very strongly in that direction), that predictive prophecy is hardly to be recognized anywhere; that it is better out of our thoughts; that it is but "soothsaying" after all, and that the true work of the prophet was not to fore-tell but to "_forth_-tell," to proclaim present and eternal principles, which again were not revealed to him from above but arrived at by intuitions and meditations within his own consciousness. It is a grave thing to be asked to believe, as many would have us do, that such was the lack of feeling for veracity in ancient Judah that Hilkiah, Jeremiah, and Huldah could arrange for the "discovery" of a fabricated Deuteronomy, and then (_see the narrative_ in the Second Book of Kings) [xxii. 8-20.] get the prophetess to follow up the fabrication with awful denunciations--all fulfilled--in the name of THE LORD Himself. Such theories we are asked to hold in face of our Master Christ's deliberate, persistent, manifold testimony to the supernatural character and _authority_ of the Old Testament; to the solidity of its records of fact, to the reality of its predictive element--on which He stayed His sacred soul in Gethsemane, and on the Cross itself. It is no longer a question of details, an inquiry whether the numerals are invariably authentic and accurate; whether the minute particulars of a king's death as told in Chronicles tally with the account in Kings. It is a question whether the Old Testament at large is not a singularly and flagrantly untrustworthy record. It is a question whether its literature as a whole is not to be explained, practically, by "natural causes"; including a causation by deliberate, elaborate, and interested untruth.

A GRAVE ALTERNATIVE.

Is it too much to say that the alternative has come to be this: Was our Lord Himself right or very gravely wrong about the nature of Scripture?

Did the Spirit of Pentecost guide the Apostles into all truth, or leave them under a vast illusion in this central matter of their witness? "Do not follow this Book, young men; follow Christ": so said a speaker of high Christian reputation, holding up a Bible, before a great gathering in America, not long ago. But what does this mean? Christ carries the Book in His hand; if you follow Him you must follow it. If you decline to follow the Book, your following Him is a following--so far as at present you agree with Him, and not further.

WITNESSES FOR SCRIPTURE.

Meantime, what are some facts of the case, facts not nearly so well remembered now as they should be? One comprehensive fact is that the testimony of nature and of history goes, as a whole, to affirm the veracity of the Scripture records, and to do so more and more pointedly as research advances. In a remarkable recent essay by the Duke of Argyll (_Nineteenth Century_, January, 1891), the growing acc.u.mulation of geological evidence for a Great Flood, affecting at least the northern hemisphere, and falling within the human period, is forcibly set out by a master hand. In the same paper is indicated the fast-gathering evidence, now digging up month by month from the soil of Palestine, to the accuracy of the picture of Canaan drawn in the Pentateuch and Joshua. The Ordnance Survey of Sinai has amply shown that the geology of the peninsula confirms down to minute details the record in Exodus.[4]

And now the Oxford Arabic Professor is making it, at the least, extremely likely that the Hebrew written two centuries before Christ was more modern by many generations than that presented by the Book of Daniel.[5]

[4] See Sir J. DAWSON: _Modern Science in Bible Lands_, "The Topography of the Exodus."

[5] _See_ MARGOLIOUTH: _The Place of Ecclesiasticus in Semitic Literature_.

I am only indicating and suggesting. Remembering the curiously similar history of New Testament criticism during the recent past, some of its stages running out their course within my own memory, I cannot but think, looking from the merely literary view-point, that the days are not far off when the now powerful theories of revolutionary criticism will seem improbable. And so I ask my younger Brethren at least _to pause_ before going with the strong, deep stream.

THE DUKE OF ARGYLL QUOTED.

Let me quote a few sentences from the Duke of Argyll's paper:--

THE WORK OF THE SPADE.